Who do these senators think they are anyways?

Who the heck does Senator DiFi think she is? Unfortunately, like her fellow U.S. senators, especially her fellow Democratic senators, she seems to think she is one really big cheese.

by Ken

Our friend Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars is normally the most poised and calmly reasoning of commentators, which makes it that much more delicious when she's pushed beyond her breaking point. About two weeks ago the Baroness I mean California Senator Dianne Feinstein accomplished this feat, when she hauled her imperial self onto the TV and calmly shredded the major elements of the president's health care reform package as we know it:

Dianne Feinstein: "I don't know if Obama has the votes (for health care) now."



With DINOs like DiFi, who needs to worry about Republicans?

President Barack Obama may not have enough votes in the U.S. Senate to pass his effort to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein said.

“I don’t know that he has the votes right now,” Feinstein said today on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “I think there’s a lot of concern in the Democratic caucus.” Controlling costs of the new system is a “difficult subject.”

So the very wealthy DiFi, who hasn't met an appropriation she wouldn't try to swing to her husband's company and ended up having to resign from the Military Construction Appropriations committee when this conflict came to light, and lucky recipient of free healthcare, courtesy of the U.S. Senate, doesn't think that the 59 (nay, 60, if Franken ever gets his seat) Democrats can actually pull it together to vote for the health care reform that a HUGE percentage of Americans want?

Pardon my French, Di, but WHY THE FRAK NOT???? Her answers don't make a lot of sense, frankly. . . .

Oh, Nicole proceeds to her more usual point-by-point reasoning, but all I could think of when I saw her post was, "Who do these senators think they are?"

Well, they think they're big cheeses is what. Giant big cheeses.

Before we blame Harry Reid's leadership or lack of it for all the evils in the world, or even for all the (many) failures of the Senate Democratic majority since it reemerged in the 2006 election, and of course was dramatically upped in the 2008 one,

To pick just one example, it's an interesting question whether Senator Harry could have dealt more harshly with Dem-unfriendly Sen. Holy Joe Lieberman at the start of the 211th Congress if he'd wanted to (and you'll recall that, while he was hardly advocating tossing His Holiness from the caucus, he was hoping the members would send him a message when he turned the matter over to them). Between the signals coming from the White House that Holy Joe was not to be harmed, there was clearly widespread sentiment amont the Democratic members against punishing their pal Joe.

We have to remember here that the title "majority leader" is something of a misnomer as applied to the U.S. Senate. The reality is that the job is more like "majority steward." You get the job by building a network of palships, and when those pals put you in the leader's chair, the last thing they expect from you is hassling or arm-twisting or intimidation. About the only thing that interests them, is what can you do for them?

Of course the majority leader has substantial control over Senate scheduling and all sorts of matters that affect the daily lives of his conference members, but he has to be careful how he uses that "power." Because he knows that if enough of those members feel that he's using them for somebody's benefit other than his own, he's toast.

Just last week DWT's own Noah was giving our Harry hell. And the other day our friend Balakirev, who regular readers of the DWT comments will be aware has, shall we say, roughly zero patience for Senator Harry's leadership style, and is also dubious about the influence being exerted, or not being exerted, by the White House, passed along this excerpt from a Kathleen Hunter CQPolitics profile of the majority leader the other day:

Reid says he expects the tactic of gentle persuasion to work best, given the size of his Senate Democratic flock and the political divergences within it. “I don’t dictate how people vote,” he said in an interview this month. “If it’s an important vote, I try to tell them how important it is to the Senate, the country, the president … But I’m not very good at twisting arms. I try to be more verbal and non-threatening. So there are going to be -- I’m sure -- a number of opportunities for people who have different opinions not to vote the way that I think they should. But that’s the way it is. I hold no grudges.”

The emphasis was added by Matthew Yglesias in his post of our Harry's remarks, to which Yglesias appended the amusing note: "I’m not sure I would say this philosophy has been bearing a ton of fruit. " At least as interesting, though, I think, is the first comment added to the post:

Duvall Says:

But I’m not very good at twisting arms. I try to be more verbal and non-threatening.

He knows that “twisting arms” is a metaphor, right?

It’s important to remember that Reid is the leader that the Senate Democrats chose. If they wanted a leader that demanded things from them, they would [have] picked someone else. Don’t put all the blame on the substitute teacher.

I'm not disagreeing that inherent in the majority leader's powers are a whole lot of things he could do to influence his members toward agendas that he supports. (Of course, then we also need to know which agendas he actually supports!) One thing is for sure, though: If you try to exercise power and fail, you wind up with less power than you even thought you had.

Our image of the whip-cracking Senate majority leader traces back to the days of Lyndon B. Johnson, which may be odd because a lot of the people who have that image barely remember who Lyndon B. Johnson was. Just for laughs, I assembled this list of the conference leaders in the Senate (majority or minority) dating back to the Age of LBJ:

DEMOCRATIC SENATE LEADERS since 1953

Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas (1953-61), majority leader 1955-61
Mike Mansfield of Montana (1961-77), majority leader the whole time
Robert Byrd of West Virginia (1977-89), majority leader 1977-81 and 1987-89
George Mitchell of Maine (1989-95), majority leader the whole time
Tom Daschle of South Dakota (1995-2005), majority leader 1/3-20/2001 and 6/6/2001-1/2003
and Our Harry of Nevada (2005-present), majority leader since 2007


REPUBLICAN SENATE LEADERS since 1959

Everett Dirksen of Illinois (1959-69), never majority leader
Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania (1969-77), never majority leader
Howard Baker of Tennessee (1977-85), majority leader 1981-85
Bob Dole of Kansas (1985- 6/96), majority leader 1985-87
Trent Lott of Mississippi (6/1996-2003), majority leader 6/1996-2000 and 1/20-6/6/2001
Bill Frist of Tennessee (2003-07), majority leader the whole time
and Our Miss Mitch of Kentucky (2007-present), still never majority leader, thank goodness

[I think I've got the little microscopic twists and turns more or less right, but after all it's the big picture we're concerned with here.]

I don't know about you, but apart from LBJ, I don't see a whip-cracker in the bunch. For that matter, it's worth remembering that LBJ wasn't exactly LBJ, being in many ways powerless before the entrenched conservative Southern senatorial barons who ruled the major committees. In theory, the reforms that diluted the powers of the committee chairs should have increased those of the majority leader, and I'm sure in some ways they have. But looking at those rosters of "leaders" (bearing in mind that on the Republican side the reign of nebbishes is misleading, because the Republican members get their discipline from higher sources), not to mention the ongoing history of day-to-day Senate operations, suggests that in choosing their "leaders," Senate members have expressed their own feelings about that transfer of power, and have generally thought it would be best transferred to them.

Which is no excuse for letting up the heat on Harry. He's got to get the job(s) done for the simple reason that there isn't anyone else to do it.

Did I hear somebody say, "We get the Senate we deserve"? No? Okay, maybe I'll say it.

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